All people have had very pleasant and real dreams, and have been disappointed when suddenly waking up. You may try to fall asleep right away, hoping to pick up where you left off. Unfortunately, dreams don't work like that. However, if you use sleep meditation techniques and focus on the correct visualization, you may be able to return to another version of the dream that allows you to experience it again in profound new ways.
Steps
Method 1 of 3: Go back to sleep right away
Step 1. Don't move
If you wake up in the middle of a dream that you want to resume, be totally still. If you move when you wake up, sensory input from your environment will begin to interfere with the remnants of sleep that linger in your mind. This will cause the remembered elements of the dream to dissipate.
Step 2. Keep your eyes closed
It is much easier to resume a dream if you keep your body in a ready state for sleep. This means that you should stay still, your body should be relaxed, and most importantly, your eyes should be closed. The light has the effect of waking up the brain, which is the last thing you want. If you want to be able to recreate the atmosphere of a dream, you have to do it quickly, before the impression it leaves disappears.
Keeping the room as dark as possible while you sleep can minimize unwanted light stimulation
Step 3. Breathe slowly and deeply
Control your breathing. Try to take the same long, slow breaths that you would when stretching after training. The sooner you bring your breath to the cadence of rest, the more likely you are to fall asleep while the components of sleep are still vibrating in your unconscious mind.
- Regulated breathing techniques (such as the 4-7-8 method) may help you fall asleep faster if you usually need time to get back to sleep.
- To perform this technique, all you have to do is inhale slowly to the count of four, hold your breath to the count of seven, and exhale fully and forcefully to the count of eight. As the brain becomes oxygenated, the body will naturally enter a state of relaxation and will be more receptive to hormones that induce sleep.
- Many people claim that regulating their breathing allows them to fall asleep in as little as a minute.
Step 4. Remember the last impressions of the dream
Make an effort to remember as much as you can about the dream you were having when you woke up between startles. What happened? Who participated in the dream? What did the surroundings look like? How did you feel about what was happening? Give yourself permission to enter that emotionally receptive and thoughtless state until you fall asleep again.
- Dreams are essentially random combinations of sensory reactions, feelings, and thoughts drawn from real life. If you focus on resuming an interrupted dream while falling asleep, there is a greater chance that your next dream chain will contain the same images and events.
- Many sleep researchers believe that emotional response is the most influential factor in how much sleep people remember.
Method 2 of 3: Have a Notebook of Your Dreams
Step 1. Remember everything you can
If you return to consciousness and cannot fall asleep immediately, collect the dream in your thoughts. Note the most important and memorable details of the dream, and especially your role in it, such as what you were doing, how you perceived the action, etc.
- It is important to take in as much information from the dream as possible while it is still present in your short-term memory. The part of the brain that forms and stores memories is effectively at rest when sleeping, so details evaporate quickly and, very often, forever.
- If you're unsure about remembering a certain detail or you think your imagination fills in the gaps, dig into it anyway. At the very least, it will be useful to resume a dream close to the original, with lost details replaced by your creative touch.
Step 2. Solidify the ideas of the dream
Turn every impression you remember into something real with physical qualities. Focus on how things looked and sounded, what the context was like, and other sensory aspects that you may remember. This will give your mind images of substance to correct as you try to redirect it back to the dream state.
A good method to elicit as many detailed memories as possible is to ask your dream memory six basic questions that journalists try to answer when investigating a story: who, what, where, when, why, and how
Step 3. Write the details of the dream
In as much detail as possible, write what happened in the dream from the point of view that it happened. If you can remember an entire scene, write it down from beginning to end. If you only remember fragments, arrange them in as much continuity as possible so that the brain can pick up the rhythm. Record the content of the dream accurately. It is important that your mind can remember all the relevant details, such as giving a description of a suspect to a criminal portrait artist.
- Don't wait to write down what you remember from a dream. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that you will be able to remember it later, but it is never as simple as you think it can be.
- Don't worry about spelling, grammar, and even writing in straight lines when jotting down an entry in your dream notebook. Just be sure to capture everything that crosses your mind.
Step 4. Create sketches of the action
On the next blank page of the description, make some quick drawings of the action that occurred in the dream. Give the characters and events a more visual foothold in your memory, as well as something to hold onto your mind when you want to go back to sleep. Think about the story books you read as a child and how they provide an illustration of the main events in the narrative. Your notebook should contain as much information as you remember from each phase of sleep.
If you want, you can color in the sketches or create a kind of cartoon progression, like a movie storyboard. The more details you record, the better
Method 3 of 3: Guiding Dreams Through Meditation
Step 1. Get ready to sleep
In some cases, you may be able to continue or review a dream that you had a few nights or even weeks before. It begins by preparing the body for rest. Close your eyes, relax your whole body, and control your breathing. Allow your breathing to take on a natural rhythm. Eliminate all thoughts that are not related to the dream that you want to access.
- Make sure there are no unnecessary distractions in the room, such as a television or radio that make it difficult for you to fall asleep or wake you up unexpectedly.
- If you have a dream notebook, you can review it before you go to sleep so that the images stay fresh in your thoughts.
Step 2. Evoke the dream experience
Go through the details of the remembered dream, all the sensory elements and the way you felt when you first experienced it. Get in that original emotional state. As you fall asleep, think that your consciousness is in transit to your destination (the desired dream).
Step 3. Play the dream repeatedly
Imagine that the dream you want to relive is a scene from a movie that is projected in your mind over and over again. Go through each individual section painstakingly, immersing yourself not only in the atmosphere of the dream, but also in the familiarity of the cycle.
The details that are most clearly remembered in dreams usually come from the end of the REM dream - just before you wake up. If you want to follow a specific dream, calculate the remembered sleep cycle to fall asleep with the most vivid details fresh in your mind. Combine sleep visualization with relaxing, regulated breathing techniques, and play the most memorable parts slowly in your mind, like a movie being projected at half speed
Step 4. Go to sleep with the dream on your mind
Hopefully, you will successfully fall asleep during the process of remembering the details of the dream and find yourself in a kind of variant of the original dream, complete with the same basic characteristics, but different in how it occurs. With a little practice, you will have greater control over the structure of your dreams, reliving the same type of dream many times, changing the action and the outcome, and even choosing what to dream about.
- Don't be discouraged if you can't relive a certain dream on the first try. You may have to try several times before recreating the dream.
- The practice of training yourself to moderate your own dreams is called "lucid dreaming," and is believed by some to be a little-known way of exploiting subconscious mind processes that dominate when you sleep.
Advice
- Empty your bladder just before bed so you don't have to wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night if you have woken up from a dream.
- There is evidence to suggest that playing video games frequently gives some people the ability to more easily access and modify certain types of dreams, as they are used to controlling actions, perspective, and outcomes.
- If you have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, invest in an electric fan or white noise machine. Ambient sound is soft and non-stimulating, and it can help you calm yourself to sleep.
Warnings
- Most experts agree that it is not possible to continue a dream in the strict sense. However, you can create a conducive mental environment to generate new forms of sleep for a similar, but novel experience.
- Dream experimentation can change natural sleep cycles and cause a lot of fatigue after a while. It may be better to set aside a few nights a week to try and resume family dreams rather than make it an all-night mission.